Mao's hated landlords allowed to return to China

They were one of the first groups to suffer under Mao's ruthless purges.

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Huang Yue, 64, (left) and Li Qishu, 60, have both sold half their land under the Chinese government's land reform initiative
Photo: MALCOLM MOORE

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But Liu Xiaoping is refusing to be pressured into selling
Photo: MALCOLM MOORE

By Malcolm Moore in Chongqing

2:49PM GMT 31 Oct 2008

Millions of the 'hated landlord class' were denounced, killed or driven to suicide in the push which paved the way for each peasant to have his own slice of land.

But 60 years on, the Communist Party is preparing to renounce the country's final trace of collectivism.

Each of China's 800 million farmers will be given the right to sell their land to a landlord in a move designed to transform the countryside from a patchwork of tiny, hardscrabble plots into large, efficient farms.

Currently, China has 193 million farms which are smaller than five acres, compared to fewer than two million in the United States.

As a result, the size of the Chinese harvest has not grown for the past decade and any crop failure could lead to mass starvation.

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Each year, 8.5 million farmers abandon their plots for the riches of China's cities, but until now they have been unable to rent or sell their land.

Nor have they had any incentive to invest in new farming techniques, or to admit when things go wrong. There are widespread reports of farmers who sell diseased meat and milk because their financial survival depends on it.

The new reform, which has been approved by the Party's Central Committee, stops short of privatisation but allows farmers to convert their 30-year land leases into money which they can invest in new businesses.

The reform also reverses the last piece of Chairman Mao's legacy, and the plank on which the Communist Party built its early support, the determination to "dou di zhu", or "fight the landlord".

Large landholders are already emerging to take advantage of the new system.

Kwok Ho, the chief executive of Chaoda Modern Agriculture, said he was planning to spend around 2.5 billion RMB (£235 million) buying farmland next year.

The move to enrich the countryside has been driven by a growing unease over China's precarious economic policy. China's factories are already preparing for savage cuts in case a global recession leaves America and Europe with less appetite for their cheap goods.

Industry analysts estimate that three million workers will be fired before the end of January. To keep its economy afloat, China needs its farmers to start spending more money. "It's a race between how much US consumption falls and how fast rural incomes grow," said Yasheng Huang, a Beijing-born academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Huang pointed out that China's peasants have been choked of investment and credit for almost 20 years in order to pay for the skyscrapers of Shanghai and Beijing. There are now 30 million more illiterate Chinese as a result, according to official statistics.

Nowhere is the growing friction between city and country more evident than in Chongqing, which lies in the heart of China's "breadbasket" agricultural region. Technically, Chongqing is the biggest city in the world, with over 31 million residents. However, the "city" stretches far out into the Sichuan countryside, and more than half the population is rural.

The gap between them is rising fast, with city dwellers now earning 12,000 RMB a year (£1,123), four times the earnings of farmers. Consequently, the city has been chosen as a test bed for the reforms.

Qiu Daochi, a professor of geography at South West University and previously the vice-director of the Chongqing land resources bureau, said raising the incomes of peasants was key to maintaining a "harmonious society".

"The leases on the land are all given out by the village committees," said Professor Cui Zhiyuan at Tsinghua University. "If the proper allocation of the land depends on those committees, the farmers will have more incentive to vote," he added.

Qilin village, which lies two hours from the city centre, is one of the first places where the reforms have been allowed to take place. A citrus fruit company from Macao, named Ganges, has bought land from a number of farmers.

However, the process appears far from smooth, with the local work unit interfering to grab land in some places and pressuring villagers to give up their leases.

"They took two of our acres and promised us a dividend in five years time," said Wu Yanhua, 35, glumly. "There was nothing we could do, it was peer pressure," she added.

Professor Huang said the Party is finally on the right track. "The current leadership has the right idea in land reform. If you don't get the rural areas right, you get broken," he said.